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You look like a good way to break my heart
1. Yesterday was my brother's twenty-sixth birthday. We watched Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Undead (2009) and grilled all the things.
2. I dreamed last night of lying in bed with someone who was a patchwork androgyne of two lovers of mine, with both their memories. It took me some while on waking to realize this fact; in the dream I had mostly noticed the presence of each by turns, except for the scars.
3. A.S. Byatt on Norse myth and her upcoming novel:
As a child I had always sympathised with Loki, because he was a clever outsider. When I came to write this tale I realised that Loki was interested in chaos—his stories contain flames and waterfalls, the formless things inside which chaos theorists perceive order inside disorder. He is interested in the order in destruction and the destruction in order. If I were writing an allegory he would be the detached scientific intelligence which could either save the earth or contribute to its rapid disintegration. As it is, the world ends because neither the all-too-human gods, with their armies and quarrels, nor the fiery thinker know how to save it.
I still cannot tell whether she is going to have written a book I like or whether I will want to throw it across the room, but I am coming to the conclusion that everyone who reads Norse myth as a child imprints on Loki; at least, I've never heard of anyone who came away from the D'Aulaires desperately wanting to be Thor. (I liked Skaði, who loved mountain forests and winter and hunting with the bow, but the bit where she couldn't stand to live by the sea confused me.) Also, if no one has written a modern Loki as a chaos theorist, someone should get right on that, please. He would wear a lab coat for the affectation of it, but the glasses would be real: they could be used to burn.
Off to hang out with![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
sigerson, sen_no_ongaku, schreibergasse, and other people whose livejournal names do not begin with S.
2. I dreamed last night of lying in bed with someone who was a patchwork androgyne of two lovers of mine, with both their memories. It took me some while on waking to realize this fact; in the dream I had mostly noticed the presence of each by turns, except for the scars.
3. A.S. Byatt on Norse myth and her upcoming novel:
As a child I had always sympathised with Loki, because he was a clever outsider. When I came to write this tale I realised that Loki was interested in chaos—his stories contain flames and waterfalls, the formless things inside which chaos theorists perceive order inside disorder. He is interested in the order in destruction and the destruction in order. If I were writing an allegory he would be the detached scientific intelligence which could either save the earth or contribute to its rapid disintegration. As it is, the world ends because neither the all-too-human gods, with their armies and quarrels, nor the fiery thinker know how to save it.
I still cannot tell whether she is going to have written a book I like or whether I will want to throw it across the room, but I am coming to the conclusion that everyone who reads Norse myth as a child imprints on Loki; at least, I've never heard of anyone who came away from the D'Aulaires desperately wanting to be Thor. (I liked Skaði, who loved mountain forests and winter and hunting with the bow, but the bit where she couldn't stand to live by the sea confused me.) Also, if no one has written a modern Loki as a chaos theorist, someone should get right on that, please. He would wear a lab coat for the affectation of it, but the glasses would be real: they could be used to burn.
Off to hang out with
sigerson, sen_no_ongaku, schreibergasse, and other people whose livejournal names do not begin with S.
no subject
---L.
no subject
Early in the film, a young actor on his way to rehearse his newly landed, off-off-off-Broadway leading role is abruptly pulled aside by a homeless woman who wants his autograph, only to receive this cautionary advice: "Just remember—if you're ever in a play about Hamlet and vampires, call the number on the side of this pen. You are in great danger."
Later on, he calls the number on the side of the pen.
There are ways in which I find it impossible to tell whether Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Undead is a good movie, except that I think it was inevitable from the moment the writer-director thought of the title: the plot is a classic secret history/literary conspiracy treated with headbanging absurdity and then played totally slacker-indie straight. The results are very funny, if a little like watching a comedy made out of Verfremdungseffekt; I'm just not sure if the film should have maybe stopped one layer back. (Oddly, I think the same combination would made a brilliant short novel.) My brother and his wife really seemed to enjoy it, though, which was the point of the exercise. And I'd definitely check out whatever the director did next.
no subject
---L.